August 29, 2013

The first time I watched this movie, this scene -- not the scene in which Warren Beatty pushes Natalie Wood to her knees, or frolics naked under the waterfall with the town tramp(the girl in the orange sweater here) -- made me prick up my ears. When Miss Metcalf (Martine Bartlett) made Natalie Wood read the Wordsworth lines aloud, I scribbled them on a scrap of paper and found the poem in one of my mother's college textbooks. I was about twelve or thirteen years old and for the next few days managed to slip a few lines of WW into all of my conversations as I tried to memorize Wordsworth's Immortality Ode. It's still one of my all-time favorite poems.

August 19, 2013

I’ve been teaching at the Vermont College of Fine Arts (VCFA) Postgraduate Conference for the past week, and while there I had a few moments when my vision of poetry expanded. I don’t mean this in any kind of New Age, epiphanic way, but in a real world utilitarian way. As a poet practicing the craft in the 21st Century, have you ever pondered what poetry is really doing—how it applies to life, how it affects people, how far is its reach?—in the age of the internet, streaming video, the rebirth of 3D in theaters, and the advent of Netflix in homes? Well, I think about it all the time, and I thought about it with a hyper-awareness this week in Montpelier, VT. I’ll try to recall a few of these moments this week for this blog.

The structure of VCFA is that, as a participant, you attend workshops daily (I taught a manuscript workshop); you attend readings throughout the week by all participants and faculty; and you attend craft talks by each of the faculty members. It’s intense but generous in its offerings. I condensed into an hour a craft class that I teach over the course of a semester at the University of Michigan called Cinematic Movement. Like I said, it’s intense but generous. An hour before the class my mother called me from Ohio. She was just checking in to see how things were going; I told her I was preparing to go teach a class. She asked me what I was teaching. I had to pause for a second to take all the varnish off of it. The problem is that I was still, just an hour before, pondering what, exactly, I really had to say. I told her, I was teaching a class on what poets can learn from watching film. She then followed up her question with a statement: “Oh, so this is about the book you just wrote.” I had to think about that, too, for a second…Yes, I thought, it kind of is.

In fact, though, the class I taught was about the book I wanted to write; it was about the ambition I had for the book I just wrote. I wanted to write a book in which people could engage as easily as one might engage watching a good film. In the class, I talked about the ability for the filmmaker to ground and orient a viewer both spatially and temporally in the scene—scene after scene. I talk about the ways in which matching action and shot sequences work to place us in a scene and to place us in a situation. If a film is even remotely competent, we, at least, know what’s going on, where we are, and who is creating the action. And I compared the need for standardized shot sequences—things like standard coverage and the 180-degree rule—to keep viewers situated in the scene, to the need for associative patterns and logical transitions in a poem to keep a reader grounded. I compared the failure in this structure to the moments I experience in a workshop when I say that a line or a word has “taken me out of the poem.” There is a certain form to the way shots are sequenced, and we are as acculturated to those forms as much as we are believers in the sonnet. At this point on the timeline, we expect a cut in film every two to three seconds—shifting points of view, toggling between images—and we don’t get dizzy. Avid editing suddenly makes some of our favorite classic films from the 60s and 70s feel slow.

But all of that is not the point.

The point is this: What do we use all of that for? Well, we use it to tell a story. We use it to forget that any craft is involved at all. We do it so that we can forget where the strings are attached. We do it to direct the focus on what is being said. Too often, as in the teaching of this class, we get overly fixated on craft to the detriment of content. I realize over time that teaching craft gets easier and easier. Teaching what to pour into is what cannot be taught; we have to choose that for ourselves, but this is the stuff that makes us artists of high art. Sadly, too few students want to hear this. At VCFA, I was blessed with a workshop that ranged in age from 26 to 78; that included, blacks, whites, Latinos, straights and gays; and that even had a range of religious beliefs. These folks had some shit to write about, and we got to talk about content and how to shape it through a few tweaks with craft. I realized that this was not my typical experience teaching a workshop, but it took me a while to really home in on why.

This occurred to me recently as I watched the awkwardly titled Lee Daniels’ The Butler. Despite the title, it’s not about Lee Daniels’ butler; Lee Daniels just directed the film. The movie is better written on a scene-by-scene basis than it is as a series of scenes comprising a film, but it is, nonetheless, despite its reliance on formula from time to time, better written than 95% of what is coming out of Hollywood today. (A few critics have knocked the writing for being too formulaic, but if this is the formula, more films need to get their hands on it. Cable TV and Netflix are kicking film in the ass because the studios seem afraid to make movies that really speak to the human condition, but that’s another blog entry.) On the surface, it’s a film that feels like my least favorite genre: the biopic. At its core, though, it’s about relationships: the relationship between fathers and sons, between husbands and wives, between neighbors, and the relationship among men who work together. There’s also the larger issue centered on the power dynamics between superiors and subordinates, which is threaded through each relationship in the film. This is the real strength of the writing in this one; this is found in its nuances, and this is what I found emotionally striking. When I see a film, I’m always asking if it, in some way, transcends its genre to offer something new, and in this case, Lee Daniels’ The Butler manages to cover the full life of a figure who is fairly unknown, but the film uses this figure as a marker of history. That is to say, we recognize the historical figures orbiting around his story more than we recognize the figure at its center.

If this film were a poem, it would be an epic poem. Twenty years ago, if you were to ask me what is an epic poem—what it does, even—I would have said that it chronicles the culture and history of a people by tracking the journey of a hero. I find that definition to be much too narrow now, though. Indeed, I think epics really teach us about the psychology and the collective thinking of a people by tracking a central figure who is emblematic of that experiential frame of mind over a span of years. When I saw Lee Daniels’ The Butler, I thought, Yes, why can’t we start teaching this? And where are our epic poems of the 21st century? I think we need to start thinking of content as craft and talk more about life when we talk about the art of the poem. The greatest artistic problem set before us is the greatest challenge we face in our day: talking across ethnic/racial lines, talking across gender lines, talking across lines of sexual orientation, talking across regional and generational lines. If we don’t attend to that problem, we might as well stay home and watch cable.

June 10, 2013

The subtitle to the film Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer, a documentary airing on HBO tonight
(June 10, 9 p.m.), is accurate: Nadia Tolokonnikova, Masha Alyokhina, and Katya
Samutsevich, who were arrested on Feb. 21, 2012, after performing for 40
seconds on the alter of Moscow’s Christ the Savior Cathedral, do indeed embody
many of the precepts of 1970s punk-rock culture. Although presenting themselves
as a band, they view their work as performance art as much musical performance.
A collective of unstated numbers of young women, Pussy Riot has found its most
effective communication tool to be planned “spontaneous” musical performances
that consist of rudimentary songs proclaiming their feminist,
anti-authoritarian stance.

In
the documentary, the members come off as tough-minded, resourceful, and wry:
“It’s not too hard,” one of them says of their punk-band strategy: “Write a
song and think of the place to perform.” Filmmakers Mike Lerner and Maxim
Pozdorovkin have footage of the group assembling at a protest site, divvying up
the musical duties (“You play the guitar”), and diving headlong into a song or
two before scramming.

Since
the sacrilegious sin-crime and immediate arrest that made the group famous
worldwide lasted a mere 40 seconds captured on what looks like a jittery
cellphone, the bulk of A Punk Prayer
is taken up by the show-trial of what I’d call the Pussy Riot Three. Placed
behind a glass cage, the three women are allowed to make occasional statements,
but their defense team comes off irritatingly smug and complacent – it’s as
though the lawyers defending Pussy Riot lacked Pussy Riot’s own awareness of
just how offended the combination of defying the Orthodox Church and Vladimir
Putin’s leadership would be to the court system.

The
trial exerts a sickening fascination. The film is warmed by the comments of
some of the defendants’ parents. Soon after Nadia tells us that her father is “wonderful…
so supportive,” he proves it. A thoughtful, baby-boomer generation man, he tells
of being told by his daughter of Pussy Riot’s church-invasion plan as they rode
the subway. He says he immediately tried to talk her out of it, but “after a
few stops” on the subway ride, he realized she was determined to go through
with her actions. His reaction? “I started helping out with the lyrics,” he
says.

Unmentioned in the
film is the debt Pussy Riot says it owes to the Russian poet Alexander
Vvedensky (1904-1941), himself a government-suppressed poet of organized
anarchy, and, like the Pussy Riot Three, a member of an art collective, OBERIU
(Association of Real Art). During her group’s trial, Nadia specifically cited
Vvedensky’s “principle of ‘poor rhyme’… He said, ‘Sometimes I think up two
rhymes, a good and a poor one, and I pick the poor one, because it is the one
that is right.”

A
Vvedensky poem collected in the superb, recently published An Invitation for Me to Think (NYRB Poets) includes lines that
could be a Pussy Riot lyric:

How cute!

Will they cut or bite off their heads

It makes me want to puke.

All those about to die get cold feet.

They have activity of stomach,

Before death it lives as hard as it can.

But why are you afraid to burn up, man?

Nadia and Masha are
serving two-year sentences in prison camps; Katya was released on appeal. One
key moment in A Punk Prayer occurs
during a break in the trial: When informed that Madonna had written the group’s
name on her back to display it at one of the concerts, and had donned a
balaclava onstage as a gesture of solidarity, the faces of Nadia, Masha, and
Katia are intent, avid. They seem not to be thinking, “Cool! A big star likes
us, maybe we’ll become famous, too, and be freed!” Instead, what their faces
communicate is: “Oh, good. Maybe she gets it. Maybe some of her fans will now
hear about us and get it. Our message still has a freedom on Madonna’s back,
and in covering Madonna’s face. She’s not as good as we are at communicating
this freedom, this audacity, but she’ll do until we get out.”

(After tonight’s premiere, Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer will be repeated on June 13, 16, 18, and
22.)

June 06, 2013

On Memorial Day weekend -- and again on the anniversary of D-Day -- we take a solemn moment to remember our war heroes. In 1944, the man who would have been my father-in-law, had he lived long enough, landed on Omaha Beach, fought in the Battle of the Bulge, and liberated a concentration camp. He also slugged an officer who made anti-Semitic taunts.

Some spend the day, or a portion of it, watching war movies, and you can see great ones about a Japanese prisoner of war camp in Burma, the brainwashing of GIs by Chinese militants during the Korean War, the plight of returning veterans having a tough time readjuisting to civilian life, the story of a Swedish industrialist whom the British blackmail into spying on Nazi industrial capacity not to mention do-or-die missions behind enemy lines in Europe; traumatized pilots returning to their base in Britain after one flight too many; escape attempts from German POW camps; the exploits of generals, the fate of battles, the derring-do of a charismatic hero; a mutiny on a US Navy destroyer-minesweeper that has seen better days; heroism on the home front with an alliterative heroine such as Greer Garson or Claudette Colbert.

My Triple Cain theory of Hollywood and War is based on a primal parable of guilt and violence, the story of Cain's slaying of his borther Abel. Hollywood movies are the invention of wandering Jews, and the moviemakers conceive themselves as marked men like Cain, protected by the vvery sign that sets him apart. This identification with Cain supports the view that violence is righteous and inevitable. There are three prominent movies in which the name Cain figures.

(b) The Caine Mutiny (1954) with Humphrey Bogart, Van Johnson, Fred MacMurray, and Jose Ferrer as the Jewish lawyer Barney Greengrass who gets the mutineers off the hook by exposing the captain, Bogart, as a paranoid playing with marbles he is destined to lose. Well, maybe Greengrass isn't his last name. It's Greenwald. But you know what I mean. I thnk especially of the spech he makes when he spills his champagne into Fred MacMurray's face, which he does not just because Fred's a hypocrite and a heel but somehow also in the name of the batty captain and similar incompetents who donate their bodies to the machinery of war, which is metaphorically identified with a US Navy destroyer on its last sea legs.

(c) The hero of High Noon (1952), willful Marshall Will Kane, played by tall stoic taciturn determined manly Gary Cooper, with goodness blonde gracious Grace Kelly as his Quaker (pacifist) bride, who shoots a man before the "real time" movie is through, and the just-married couple drives the carriage out of town with no fanfare except the lonesome Academy Award-winning song, "Do not forsake me, O my darling." Several "types of allegory" come into play, depending on whether the focus is oni) Kane,ii) Grace Kellyiii)) Frank Miller, who has vowed to kill him and is expected on the noon train,oriv) the townspeople, who are either1) spineless, 2) too young to do do anything but play cops and robbers, (3) too old to do anything but offer a warm hand claspor (4) Lloyd Bridges.

(d) Summatiom of thesis 1. Cain and Abel (Genesis) as a parable of Hollywood and the American War Machine2) Digression on Michael Caine as a British variant of the American type3) The special attractions of the prisoner-of-war camp as a site; digression on William Holden, Steve McQueen, and James Garner as three attractive North American models4) Digression on East of Eden with James Dean (whose last name is a near anagram of Eden) as a version of Cain,5) Presidential hopeful Herman Cain's moment of fame. 6) Comment from Susan Cain, author of the bestselling Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking. Cain's research tells her that "we watch people like Charlie Sheen BECAUSE they are narcissistic, not in spite of it." The obnioxious are "better liked" in college. "Not only that, but the type of narcissism that was most predictive of popularity was the most malignant kind." 7) Everything else.

May 28, 2013

From the black-and-white postwar British movie Easy Money (1948), here is the Norwegian actress Greta Gynt singing "The Shady Lady Spiv" to fellow spiv (or cheap crook) Dennis Price at the London nightclub where she works. She and Price are conspiring to rip off the football lottery outfit that employs him. The plot is a sort of milquetoast toast to Barbara Stanwyck's partnership with insurance agent Fred MacMurrary to defraud his company and eliminate ehr husband in one swell foop in Double Indemnity..But listen to the song, and delight in "spiv," a piece of English slang that has not lost its strangeness, especially when coupled with "shady lady." The movie is available streaming from Netflix. -- DL

May 10, 2013

A couple of years ago, after reading some Eliot and watching some Jacques Tati, I thought it would be a smashing idea to write a parodic blend of the two and it started thus:

The Hulot Men

Mistah Hulot—lui mort.

We are the Hulot men

We are the French men

Smoking together

Pipe
bowls filled with straw.

but it didn't get much further, thankfully. But another entanglement of poetry and Tati has come together in this image of Monsieur Hulot's brother-in-law's swanky new car in Mon Oncle:

for the cover of Heather Phillipson's new book is inspired by this vehicle. Regardez-vous:

and this cover has already had an article devoted to it in Art Review (one of the perks of being a practising artist as well as a poet).

The reason I mention all this is that last night was the London launch of Instant-flex 718 (Bloodaxe) at the Art Review Bar just off Old Street ('Silicone Roundabout' as almost nobody calls it) and the great and the good (although I prefer the term 'the out and the about') gathered to start up this gorgeously hued vehicle and drive it away.

The first words I heard out of Heather Phillipson's mouth, back in 2007, were:

The only men it's safe for me to love are dead –

O'Hara, Stevens, Berryman.

when I read with her at The Poetry Café in Covent Garden and I became a fan at that moment. These are the opening two lines from 'Devoted, Hopelessly', which appears in the book. By the way, the title refers to the type of glue used to bind the book. I could talk about how the title and some of the poems inside speak of the materiality of language as used by the poet. But I won't.

What I will say is that this debut collection contains many hilarious, touching, surprising, and intriguing poems with wonderful titles like 'German Phenomenology Makes Me Want to Strip and Run through North London', 'Red Slugs in Every Irrelevant Direction', You're an Architect and I Want to Make Dinner for You' and 'Actually I'm Simply Trying to Find My Dressing Gown Sash'.

I like a launch to be more of a party than a reading and Heather chose to read a single poem, pushing the needle of the 'launchometer' almost as far away from the 'reading' end of the 'party – reading' scale as it is possible to do. But she left us wanting more, which is always a good thing.

Another good thing is that four of us peeled off to eat fish and chips at Kennedy's on Whitecross Street, which is worth a visit if you're ever out East.

So. As Monsieur Hulot departs at the end of Mon Oncle to allow his nephew to bond with his formerly stuffy father, Monsieur Arpel, so must I depart at the end of my week as guest blogger. It's been a pleasure and there were many other things I wanted to write about, like how can we get people to stop saying "x won the Internet"? but perhaps I will continue with these over at Mo' Worse Blues.

May 07, 2013

Yesterday was a Bank Holiday in the UK. This is a day we occasionally grant to our banks so that they can take a breather from refusing to lend to businesses, insisting on unnecessary payment protection schemes, finding ways to turn public bailout money into private bonuses, and so on. They need to replenish their batteries.

And the rest of us need to go have lunch in cafés attached to museums and galleries. For a freelancer, depending on one's success or commitment, either every day is a Bank Holiday or Bank Holidays remain something that only other people enjoy. I must confess, I bunked off and practised my F major scale.

I also had time to reflect on a recent event I organised for the BFI (British Film Institute). The BFI has a generous and welcoming attitude to poets and it enjoys exploring the links between poetry and cinema. Over the last few years I've been involved in their poetry/film crossover event 'O Dreamland', which invited poets to write about their digital archive (The Mediatheque); I launched my collaborative Hitchcock homage Psycho Poetica at the BFI in 2010; and last year Isobel Dixon, Chris McCabe and I premiered The Debris Field there.

This year I was asked to organise something for their recent epic Pasolini retrospective and I considered various approaches. I thought of poetically 're-staging' Theoremusing six poets playing each of the main characters, and I also toyed with comparing the 'swinging Sixties' of Pasolini, Antonioni and Bertolucci.

But in the end I took my lead from Pier Paolo himself and his love of the literary portmanteau movie, so I suggested A New Decameron: ten films, ten poets, ten film clips, one evening of poetic and filmic enthusiasm.

I asked nine other poets and writers to join me: Jane Draycott, Charles Lambert, Glyn Maxwell, John McCullough, Valeria Melchioretto, Luca Paci, Cristina Viti, Stephen Watts and Chrissy Williams. We were also lucky enough to have Rosa Mucignat of King's College London reading some of Pasolini's poetry in the Friulian language, with translations by Cristina Viti.

The sold-out show was funny, moving and powerful by turns and I wanted to give you a little taster by posting Chrissy Williams's poem and a film clip here. Chrissy freely admits to being obsessed with Pasolini's clownish muse, the great Ninetto Davoli. I'm currently talking to the BFI and the poets about getting all the work online in the near future.

First a small sample of the irrepressible Davoli from Chrissy's chosen film The Canterbury Tales.

April 09, 2013

The work of
criticism is always, let’s say, ephemeral; Saint-Beuve’s name survives only
because Proust was against him. Even more fleeting are the reactions of the
mere reviewer. “No serious critic can devote himself, frequently, exclusively,
and indefinitely, to reviewing works most of which inevitably cannot bear,
would even be misrepresented by, review in depth,” sniffs Renata Adler in her
screed against Pauline Kael.

So the
outpouring of emotion in the wake of Roger Ebert’s death might seem a transitory
thing; already, the passing of the Iron Lady (of whom more later) has moved him
off the screens. The rise of Siskel and Ebert neatly paralleled in time the
switch from the decade-long Prague Spring of New Hollywood to the
blockbuster-driven economy still churning its way through the Marvel and DC
lineups. Even if Ebert’s courage and openness in the face of his disfiguring
illness and his resolute identity as a newspaper journalist in the twilight of
that industry render him heroic, he and his partner might still
seem like emblems in a narrative of cultural decline, banally and profitably
celebrating the culture industry’s assembly line, whatever caveats they might
have about individual products.

But I want
to offer a different view. Sneak Previews
and its successors enjoyed an astounding success, given how unpromising the
show’s basic structure might have seemed: two untelegenic, middle-aged white
guys bickering about movie clips. The show operated on the premise that arguing
about culture could draw a mass audience. And it did. “Thumbs up or down” may
have been the takeaway message, but both critics made clear that those
decisions were made for reasons, and reasons that each would emphatically try
to make the other acknowledge.

Maybe those
arguments weren’t always the most sophisticated. And maybe the very act of
treating Weekend at Bernie’s 2 as
worthy of detailed consideration was as much a con as it was a tribute to
critical open-mindedness. But in their humble way, Siskel and Ebert offered a
model of rationality, one on which thinking wasn’t a matter of following an
algorithm or asserting a purely subjective preference. In other words, it was a
humanistic kind of education.

And it
strikes me that poetry criticism, that much-lamented field, could do with more
of a dose of At the Movies-style debate. We have our dramatic flareups, as with
the fascinating byplay between Marjorie Perloff and Matvei Yankelevich last
year. But too often, even when critical disagreements break out, they either
proceed at an austere level of abstraction or wind up with people talking past
one another. I’d love to see a pair of writers devote themselves to detailed
and contentious consideration of recent books or poems of note. There are some excellent examples approximating this: Al Filreis’s Poem Talk, for instance,
or the byplay between Christian Wiman and Don Share on the Poetry podcast, but
I think there’s room for a similar effort that's neither tied to a particular
publication nor emphasizing a scholarly conversation.

***

The use of thumbs in the poetic context, though, might have its risks:

March 18, 2013

David
finally convinced me to see Zero Dark Thirty, a movie I avoided because
in general I have a low tolerance for violent movies (insomnia,
nightmares). Now, having seen it, I have a theory of why there were so
many complaints and objections.

Some
critics claim the film is an inaccurate depiction of how the CIA, by using
torture, got crucial evidence in the hunt for Usama Bin Laden. The
complainers say that the CIA did not gain this intelligence as a result of
using torture. Therefore, any depiction of waterboarding would mislead viewers.
Does the movie raise a means-and-ends question, with torture the questionable
means toward a justified ends? It’s an
arguable point, but condemning the film for this reason implies a standard of
political correctness by which a great many movies people cherish would fall to
the wayside. Moreover, that’s not really what fuss is about.

Here’s
my theory and I’m curious to know what others think: Complaints against ZDT
are coded misogyny – a protest against the idea that a woman might be a CIA
agent, doing a manly man’s job, with a soldier’s stoicism and fortitude in a
movie directed by a woman. Maya happens
to be beautiful – it’s a movie, after all – but the work she and colleagues do
is as far removed as can be from the activities of acceptable feminist models,
such as virtuous moms who oppose drunk driving, brainy attorneys who put up
with philandering husbands, and courageous whistle blowers. Furthermore, war
movies are the provenance of male directors. One such movie (Hurt Locker) is fine, but
two? It’s time to go home Ms. Bigelow and make Something’s Gotta Give.

Some
have gone so far as to say that Zero Dark Thirty is an advertisement for
the use of torture. As proof, they point to the demeanor of Maya, the CIA agent
responsible for piecing together the evidence that led to Bin Laden’s hiding
place. She is, say the critics, not sufficiently undone by the scenes of
torture. Did I see a different movie? Maya is repelled by what she
sees. She flinches, backs away, crosses her arms in front of her body,
and after one session runs to the bathroom to collect herself. What would
it take for the audience to believe that she is discomfited by the
torture? I know! She should have become hysterical. That is the
expected reaction of a woman who is upset. Instead, she behaves like the
trained CIA professional she is and uses her will to maintain her
composure.

In
time Maya appears to grow comfortable with “enhanced interrogation” techniques.
Yet Katherine Bigelow is careful to show the psychic consequences for the
interrogators. Maya’s senior colleague grows weary and has to quit to “do
something normal.” But people who think this is story about torture miss the
boat.

Zero
Dark Thirty is a serious, gripping, and masterly telling of
the long and difficult quest for a mass murderer in hiding. There is violence,
but I’ve seen much worse. The only violence that I found disturbing
happens at the very beginning of the movie, when over a dark screen we hear the
panicked 911 calls of the people trapped in the World Trade Center on
9/11. They still haunt me.

March 11, 2013

I
like it when someone doesn't like a movie (a novel, a painting, a poem). I like
it so much more than anyone's bland acceptance, like the word "good,"
when presented with a manmade creation. A friend's passionate aversion to a
work of art conjures my
defense of it. Sometimes it changes my mind. It pushes me beyond sitting silently
with only my unformed experience of the book (the play, the album).

"Connoisseur" by Norman Rockwell

Having a less-than-favorable opinion
about a work of art does not mean you don't respect the artist, or that you
can't recognize effort exerted or talent on evidence. It means that you considered
the work on its own particular terms (i.e., its intentions, time and place) and
you had your own reaction to it. It's a risk to say you didn't like something.

(I
guess a disclaimer is needed here: I'm not referring to personal attacks or opinions
based on ignorance, which are really the worst. I am also not referring to comment
trolls. I compulsively read comments; it's a curse, really, on my internet life.
I have discovered people will have comment wars over anything, including a
recipe for borscht or a YouTube video with instructions for replacing an oven
door. I don't like that. The sort of critique I'm getting at is rarer.)

Needless
to say, a friend, a party-mate, a colleague liking something with zeal is most welcome,
too, but only if the approval is articulated to the same degree as the intense aversion (somehow people find the words more easily
when they dislike). Tell me what was good about it.

Often
people don't like to disagree on a work of art; they will back away from the
conversation, as if disagreeing about a movie were a form of aggression or the
argument were personal. As if aesthetics were on the list of topics to avoid at
social occasions, along with politics, religion and sex: but then, what else is there? Please invite me to a party where the talk is mostly along the lines of politics, religion, sex and aesthetics!

Artist hosting a dinner party

The
saying goes that critics are failed artists. Because they cannot do anything, they
critique others, spewing envy and frustration. I
go back and forth with a friend who thinks that if you're not making something,
you're not entitled to pronounce your own snippy thoughts, because making
something--for example, directing even a crappy Hollywood movie--is hard. You haven't directed a movie, who are you to say it was crappy? To this, I say, Is there no
room for the thinking viewer? We're being asked to give our attention, our time. Are we then supposed to withhold any thoughts it inspires, or offer only the favorable ones?

I do think it's a different story
when the critic represents a greater authority, like the notorious Michiko
Kakutani of the New York Times Book Review. I can understand a novelist objecting to
the fact that the king-maker, the executioner, has never struggled through
writing a book herself.... But official critics shouldn't be rejected wholesale. They
often account for the only culture coverage we get in the mass media, and they
can help bring attention to worthy projects. They can serve the same function
to your own thinking as a friend liking or not liking something. You just have
to feel the courage as a nobody-reader to disagree with all of them, too, if
necessary.

I
don't mean that I would like to see everyone start a blog featuring their Very
Important Opinions about what to read or watch. But wouldn't it be grand if a
forum where people were expressing their thoughts and preferences, say, a
Facebook feed, yielded more strong opinions about movies (books, etc.) and
fewer photos of what is being eaten? I can appreciate a picture of a decadent
meal in the way I can appreciate a funny picture of a cat. But sometimes it
feels like the picture of the food has taken the place that an experience of art used to occupy. It confers the eater with a sense of having accomplished something, said something, of having acquired the creative spark used to create the food.
Except that with the food, unlike a performance, what that person will be doing
with it, basically, is putting it in his face and saying, "Mmmm." ...The
question is whether people are afraid to speak strong opinions (fear of fewer
thumbs-up "likes", fear of seeming unlikable), or whether we've lost
the patience to find the language to express the opinion.

Finding
the words gets you on the path to pursuing your own sensibility, to go beyond
passive consumption. That sounds like work, but is actually a thrill. It means
going beyond categorizing books as good or bad, or art as high-brow or low-brow,
or music as hip or lame (because some critic said so); it means being able to
find what nourishes your thinking life, your sense of beauty, your cares, your sensibility
in particular.

If
you happen to make poems, drawings, those sorts of things, a strong reaction to
a work is also a clue to your own aesthetics. You may not like something
because it's the opposite of what you want to be doing with your own work. That is valuable information in a time when there's such a bewildering explosion of varying criteria for
what constitutes art.

***

Thanks
to Best American Poetry Blog folk, Stacey Harwood and David Lehman, for having
me back this week!

"Lively and affectionate" Publisher's Weekly. Now in paperback.Click image to order your copy.

Register now for our 5th annual session Jan 27 - Feb 3. “What better place to read, write, and talk about the art and craft of writing than Todos Santos, where all the saints of the sea and sky watch over you?” - Christopher Merrill

Radio

I left it
on when I
left the house
for the pleasure
of coming back
ten hours laterto the greatnessof Teddy Wilson"After You've Gone"on the pianoin the cornerof the bedroomas I enterin the dark